Friday, May 20, 2016

LOOK BEAK IN ANGER

Opening this week:

The Angry Birds Movie—The Angry Birds franchise began in
2009 as a video game, the object of which was to launch roly-poly little birds
from a slingshot at little green pigs. The pigs have stolen their eggs, you
see. The game led to more than a dozen spin-off games, and merchandising
ranging from toys to clothes to TV cartoons, and now, inevitably, to this
animated feature.

Our hero, voiced by Jason Sudeikis, is Red, the scowling,
cardinal-like bird you’ve been seeing on kids’ hats and t-shirts the last few
years, if you’ve been paying attention. He lives on an island inhabited by
oddly flightless avians—it’s the entire Universe, as far as they know. Most of
these birds aren’t inordinately angry, so an outburst, early on, lands Red in court,
and he’s sent to an anger management class, where he meets other…well, you
know.

Then huge ships arrive filled with green pigs. The guileless
birds are taken in by their friendly overtures, except for Red, who’s
suspicious of them. He turns out to be right, of course. The pigs steal the
island’s eggs, and it’s up to Red and his anger management classmates to rouse
the ire of the populace, and lead them to the land of the pigs to try to rescue
them from the Pig King’s kettle.

The high-ticket voice cast, which includes the likes of Josh
Gad, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Peter Dinklage and even Sean
Penn—amusingly cast as the Angriest of the Birds—more or less ensures that
there will be a few laughs. There’s some ingenious visual shtick, too. But
overall The Angry Birds Movie is
tiring—too many of the gags and situations seem artificially extended, as if
the filmmakers knew they didn’t have much story to work with, and were trying
to pad for time.

More than this, there’s the whole matter of the theme of
anger. Anger is funny. Most comedy is based on some degree of anger. Anger also
resonates with children, who feel it intensely but in most cases impotently.

But there’s anger and then there’s anger. There’s
legitimate, mature outrage at, say, rudeness or injustice, and then there’s the
anger that can arise from annoyance at other people’s cheerfulness, or from
changes in our world with which we’re uncomfortable, or simply from daily
inconveniences.

We’re all subject to this second sort, of course, and it’s
always a good source of comedy. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for wisdom, and I
fear that’s how The Angry Birds Movie
wants us to see it. I certainly don’t think the film is intentionally
reactionary, but I’m also unconvinced that a celebration of anger—resolving
itself in war on foreigners—is what our society is most in need of just now. We
have plenty of angry birdbrains already.

The Lobster—Having been dumped by his wife, David (Colin
Farrell) checks into an elegant but cheerless resort hotel for singles. He has
forty-five days to find a new partner, and if he fails he’ll be transformed
into an animal. This happens often: David shares his room with his dog, who
used to be his brother.

David is asked what kind of animal he wants to be if he doesn’t
pair off, and he chooses to be a lobster, because of their longevity, and
because he loves the sea. The hotel manager congratulates him on his thoughtful
choice; the staff’s manner is always one of brisk, patronizing politeness, with
contemptuous pity just under the surface.

Compatibility in a relationship is judged by shared
impairments—nearsightedness, or a limp, or a tendency to nosebleeds, or
sociopathic heartlessness—and people regularly try to feign these limitations
to attract a mate. The guest activities include hunts of the neighboring
forest, where “Loners”—feral single people—are shot with tranquilizer darts and
brought back to undergo their transformations. Bagging a Loner adds days to
your stay at the hotel, and thus to your chances of pairing off.

In other words, this is another of those Kafka-lite pop
absurdist comedies, sort of a European spin on the likes of Being John
Malkovich or Cold Souls. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek known for
Dogtooth, from a script he co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou, the film is
seamlessly imagined and entirely coherent on its own strange terms.

The pace is a little slow, and it seems to slow down even
more in the second half. Other than that, the movie really can’t be faulted in
terms of execution. The cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, Lea
Seydoux, Olivia Colman and the excellent Ben Wishaw, maintain admirably
straight faces, and Farrell, remaining quietly shellshocked throughout, makes
you care about his plight.

It might even be fair to call The Lobster brilliant, but for
all its whimsicality, it isn’t much fun. The atmosphere is dark and desperate,
and many scenes are horrifically violent—those sensitive to violence toward
animals are particularly warned to leave this one alone.

The premise seems to have arisen from a genuine, vitriolic
bitterness toward the societal pressure to pair off, and the implication that
those who can’t, or don’t want to, are regarded as subhuman. This avoids coming
off as a hipster pose because Lanthimos pointedly shows us that life in the
woods among the Loners is no less oppressive—romance and sex are forbidden
there, and severely punished.

So The Lobster isn’t sentimental. It fully acknowledges that
there’s a price to going it alone, or two-by-two, and that the price can be
high either way. It also implies that our motivations, either way, are
generally selfish. It’s possible to be both cynical enough to respect this
viewpoint and romantic enough to be unable to fully agree with it. In any case,
this Lobster, though admirable in many ways, brought me less pleasure than one
served with butter and lemon.

My work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies (where I was a staff writer for several years) to USA Today, from Phoenix Magazine and Wrangler News and the East Valley Tribune to the Erie Times-News, Seattle Times and Detroit Metro Times to Rewind Magazine.

I'm that rare example of a living poet who has had a sonnet published in Weird Tales, and my poems have also appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly.

I've acted in theatre productions in six states and the District of Columbia, and appear for about six seconds as an extra (a prison guard) in the John Waters film Cry-Baby.

I directed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Southwest Shakespeare Festival, and a short film called Holding Back the Dawn, based on a short story by my friend Barry Graham.

I was host of Another Saturday Night, a pop culture and film review show on KTAR radio.

I have produced, directed and acted in radio plays for NPR, KTAR and the Sun Sounds Radio service.